Posting Guidelines - How to Reply

It is always great to see people giving back to the forum by way of active participation, helping new members out with their problems, it keeps the forum healthy and vibrant.

Before you do post there are a few points worth considering.

Please think through whether your help is relevant to the question and not just posting for the sake of it, as repeating advise can become annoying. By all means, give a view or add something that you feel may be helpful even if you're not sure, it never hurts and may just throw light on a problem from a different angle.

The question of DTD (DocTypes) rears its head quite often, if you feel compelled to mention the lack of DTD please consider first whether it is actually germane to the question in hand and if you decide that it is please guide the poster to the relevant help on the subject either in the 'How To' section or in off-site links.

What If I Give Bad Advice?

This may happen from time to time but please do not let it put you off from contributing, We have all at one time or another made mistakes and hopefully learnt from them, that is the nature of a learning/teaching forum such as this.

What is important though is that you realise that your mistakes will be picked up on by senior experienced members of the forum, so no harm will be done, but at the same time you must not consider having your mistakes pointed out and corrected as implying that you shouldn't have posted as this is not the case. There are those that will ensure that the level and quality of help provided is maintained, which helps ensure the reputation of the forum for accurate information, when they correct they do so without emotive response intended and it's important that people do not take offence at this or take it personally, it is never intended as a rebuke to the poster.

Hopefully you will have learnt a little more from having tried and become a stronger member for the effort, bear in mind that WE ALL started from somewhere.

So please read and review your intended reply and ensure it's as accurate as you can make it and that there are no obvious errors before posting it up, but above all else please do not be nervous about doing so.

When posting replies and offering solutions please bear in mind that in essence help offered should be publicly accessible, if showing code examples or layout examples it is best that it is within the body of the thread for all to see if they happen by in the future looking for a solution.

Where possible when linking to sites that offer guidance/tutorials try to stick with the well established sites that are going to be around and whose content is verified and established.

If you feel the need to link to your own personal web space/site to provide examples please consider whether your web space is always going to be around, can it suffer the possible increased traffic/bandwidth use.
In a forum where others may want to benefit from threads there is nothing more annoying than to find that a proposed solution is on someone's personal site and that the site url is no longer valid, as immediately we have a dead useless thread that may as well be deleted completely from the database archive.

Please refrain from commenting on the rare occasion that we get a poster not following best forum etiquette or being rude to members that is best left to Moderators to pick up on and deal with, unless it's a minor point that just needs mentioning.

Above all else please do post and participate as an active member of the community as the members are the life blood of the community without whom the forum would grind to a halt.